When you first walk in the house, the stairs are very,
very steep. The house is surprisingly small, dark, and almost completely empty.
You aren’t sure what you were expecting. But it’s so bare. There is no
furniture. Then you start to see things on the walls: the place on the wall where
the Franks measured the growth of Anne and Margot; the clippings of movie stars
that Anne pasted on the wall of her room with glue; and suddenly it becomes
very, very real. They really were here, for two long years, never leaving, never
going outside, keeping quiet all day so no one would hear them, hiding, trying
to save their lives against all odds.
I recently had the opportunity to travel to the
Netherlands, and while in Amsterdam, I had the privilege of visiting the Anne Frank House, as it is now called. It is the narrow building that held the
offices of Anne’s father, Otto, on the first two floors, and above was the
secret annex that housed the Franks and four others as they hid. It is now a
“living museum,” a very simple place, but with a line hundreds deep waiting to
get in at any moment of the day. One million visitors go there a year. Why?
The researcher and reporter in me wanted to interview
people in line and find out why they were there. I didn’t, but I wish I had,
and I hope I have a chance to do so someday. There were families with children
in tow, school groups of teenagers, young people, older people, tourists and
locals, all there to see this terrible piece of history. I don’t really
understand why so many were willing to stand in line for an hour to see this
place, but they were. They waited with
little complaint, even though the line was long and the day was hot. They
entered quietly, reverently. They looked at the displays, at Anne’s words
written on the walls. They watched the videos, testimonies from those who were
there, helpers, friends of the Frank’s. And at the end, they viewed the horrible,
neatly typed yellow cards, one for each
Frank family member, noting the date of their arrival at a concentration camp.
There is something about the small details that I found
the most painful. The growth chart. The
clippings pasted to the walls. The stairs leading to Peter’s attic room where
Anne had her first kiss. The bookcase that blocked the stairs to the secret
annex, thick books on its shelves. The
blue and white porcelain toilet. The red and white checked diary lovingly
placed on a black cushion and encased in glass. Samples of Anne’s neatly
handwritten pages. The yellow cards.
What’s unique about the Anne Frank House is that it
represents a very personal story. It’s not a large, impersonal accounting of Hitler or the Third Reich or
the Holocaust, but instead a very small story, a particular story, about a
young woman and her family, and how they tried their best to survive during a
terrible time in human history. I think the fact that it is just a tiny sliver of
the whole makes it understandable, able to be comprehended. The whole is much
too big and horrible for our brains to comprehend.
This week’s parshah, Eikev, along with many other verses
in the Torah, implores us to help the vulnerable in our world. It says in
chapter 10, verses 18 and 19: G-d upholds the cause of the fatherless and the
widow, and befriends the stranger, providing him with food and clothing. You
too must befriend the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.
In a commentary by Rabbi Salomon Gruenwald on MyJewishLearning.com, Rabbi Gruenwald
says that the Torah gives us two reasons for caring about and having empathy
with others: the first reason is we
should do it to emulate G-d, and the
second reason, because we as a nation
know what it means to be oppressed.
Rabbi Gruenwald asks: given that we have these two good reasons, why do
we so often fail to meet these ideals? Why is it so hard to help the stranger?
Rabbi Gruenwald posits that the choice of words in this
verse gives us a hint. It doesn’t say befriend the poor, but rather it
says befriend the stranger. He says : “we have trouble identifying or
empathizing with those who are far away, and who live lives so different from
our own.” The Torah realized this, and
therefore set out this commandment from G-d to correct this inclination.
This, I think, is why one million people a year line up
to see the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.
People have trouble empathizing with 6 million Jewish strangers, and 5
million others, who were killed in the Holocaust. But they don’t have trouble
empathizing with one young girl who shares her very ordinary daily life and
longings with us through her diary. In this way, Anne is no longer a stranger, and people are able to befriend
her, to know her, and in this way, to understand the larger story.
Shabbat Shalom.
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